


You Could Try

by luulapants



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Chains, Fanart, Fights with Friends, M/M, Medication, Medication Issues, Non-Sexual Bondage, POV Stiles Stilinski, Steter Secret Santa, Stiles Stilinski Gets Bitten, Stiles Stilinski Has ADHD, Werewolf Stiles Stilinski
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-27
Updated: 2020-12-27
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:48:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28355721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luulapants/pseuds/luulapants
Summary: Scott bit Stiles to save his life, but being a werewolf was never something he wanted. His meds don't work, he's not coping well, and he starts lashing out at his friends. Peter is the only person he feels safe around, because he's the only person Stiles doesn't mind hurting.
Relationships: Peter Hale/Stiles Stilinski
Comments: 59
Kudos: 326





	You Could Try

**Author's Note:**

  * For [skulled_writing](https://archiveofourown.org/users/skulled_writing/gifts).



> This Secret Santa gift for skulled_writing is a collaboration with [mock-speed](https://mock-arts.tumblr.com/) who made the GORGEOUS art embedded in the fic.

The first thing he thought when he opened his eyes was, _Holy fuck, I’m not dead_. Stiles rolled onto his back and yanked the blankets down, staring at his beautiful, flat, not-disemboweled torso. His whole life, he had taken it for granted that his insides were safely inside of him, but no more! Stiles had a new appreciation for not being able to see his own spleen.

Once he’d gotten that out of the way, the crushing dread set in.

Because he was a werewolf now.

Stiles stared at the ceiling and felt his senses spanning out farther than they ever had. There was the hiss of the shower outside his bedroom door, Isaac humming something. The clicking sound that the fridge made. Their upstairs neighbor walking around. Their _downstairs_ neighbor walking around. The hiss of a tea kettle somewhere else in the building, who knew how far off. The clicking sound that the fridge made. The hum of electricity.

That fucking… _clicking sound_ that the fridge made.

Clapping his hands over his ears, Stiles tried to bring himself back from the overwhelming buzz of noise, and his sense of smell was only too happy to step in. Isaac’s shampoo, the dishes in the sink, someone cooking bacon in another apartment, fresh-brewed coffee, the stink of the garbage chute, BO in the gym on the first floor.

Groaning, he rolled back over and yanked his pillow over his head. This was going to take some serious getting used to.

Not too long after, he heard the front door open and close. The shower had turned off, and Isaac was outside saying, “ _Hey! He hasn’t come out of his room yet_.”

“ _He’s awake, though,_ ” Scott said, and then there was a knock on his bedroom door.

Stiles pulled his head out from under the pillow and sat up. “Come in.”

He and Scott just stared at each other for a long moment. Stiles thought about how young Scott had been when he went through this, how clueless they both had been in trying to help him through it. Stiles had been in a wolf pack for the better part of six years, and he was _still_ terrified.

Scott stepped forward and practically tackled Stiles in a hug, tipping him backward awkwardly on the bed. “Man, you really scared us yesterday,” he said. His grip should have been crushing, normally would have been, but Stiles realized with an unsettling feeling that he was equal to it now. “I thought I was going to lose you.”

Stiles patted his back. The smell of Scott set off some weird instinctual _pack-alpha-family-safe_ signals that were settling him only about as much as they were _unsettling_ him. Because animal instincts were going to take getting used to, also.

Scott sat on the end of his bed and started talking through everything that had gone down after Stiles got mauled by the wendigo. Isaac had carried him back here to heal after Scott bit him, once they could see that he was healing from the attack. Stiles tried to pay attention to the story of how they had taken down the creatures – he really did – but he could hear Isaac in the kitchen, and there was some sort of traffic incident going on outside, and the fridge was still _clicking_.

“Are you okay?” Scott asked, waving a hand in front of his face.

“Yeah, I just gotta – fuck, I need my meds,” Stiles laughed, moving to get off the bed.

Scott gave him a horrified look that had Stiles planting his butt right back where it had been. “Stiles, they… they won’t work anymore.”

Stiles gaped at him. “What?”

“Your body will process them too quickly,” Scott explained. “I mean, I’m not sure how long they would last – you might get an hour or something, but… they’re not going to work like they did.”

“I need them,” Stiles said quietly, not able to really get his head around the full scope of the problem at hand. He’d been on medication since he was ten. He knew what he was like when he forgot it. Functioning without them? Every day? “Scott, I have a _job_ ,” he snapped.

Scott cringed. “I’m sorry, dude. I’m really sorry. We’ll… I mean, we can work with Deaton and see if we can figure something out, something else, but...”

The fridge clicked.

Isaac poured himself a cup of coffee.

The upstairs neighbor turned on the morning news.

The fridge clicked.

The electricity hummed.

A crow screeched outside.

The fridge clicked.

* * *

Stiles didn’t cope well, those first couple of weeks. He took what time he could off work – six whole days – and then once he was back, it was pretty much a disaster. The office was noisy and busy and crowded and there were two different women on his floor that wore perfume that made him want to commit homicide.

And that was part of the problem – the urge to commit homicide. Okay, maybe it wasn’t homicide in particular, but there were some very _violent urges_ at play, and they only got worse as the full moon approached. He was angry. All the time. He was pissed at everyone. All the time. In the course of three days, he managed to get into a fight with literally every single member of the pack, and he felt shitty afterward about all of them.

(Except maybe Peter. They fought all the time anyway. Plus, he was such a dick that Stiles didn’t have to feel bad about saying mean shit to him.)

So when the night of the full moon finally rolled around, no one asked if Stiles thought he needed to be tied up. They just asked if he wanted to do it in the preserve or the basement of the pack house. Stiles thought about the sounds of the forest, the insects and night birds, the rustle of leaves, the rush of rivers and traffic in the distance. He thought about the noise of the house, the constant buzz of the appliances and the chatter of the pack and, god, some of the wolves got horny during the full moon, and he’d be stuck listening to them fucking all night, most likely.

He chose the preserve.

* * *

Stiles was spitting mad, thrashing against the chains tying him to the tree. They held him too tightly, didn’t let him move, and his muscles _screamed_ for movement and his nerves grated at the clinking of the chains. Stiles wanted to run, wanted to fight, wanted to fucking _kill something_. Even if he could get out of the chains, he was surrounded by too many pack members. They would subdue him in an instant. Subdue, not fight. That was the problem. Stiles wanted to feel bone break. His, theirs, he didn’t really care. He wanted to taste blood.

Because he couldn’t get his claws into his friends, he cut into them with words.

Stiles wouldn’t really remember what he said to his pack that night, but he would remember that it was bad. He was intentionally cruel, finding and digging into the soft spots that they had entrusted him with over the years. Secrets. Insecurities. Painful memories. Things they didn’t even know he knew about them. It all came up in a rush of bile and fury as he thrashed against the chains, grinding them against the tree bark.

Scott sent Liam away first, not trusting his temper. Stiles rocked forward, grating the chains into the wood. He went after Malia next. One by one, she and the rest of the betas rose to his baiting and were sent away until it was just Scott, Derek, and Peter. And Stiles was pretty sure he could get under Derek’s skin, too.

“Are you _trying_ to get them to attack you!?” Scott asked, exasperated.

“Lucky for them, our savior Scott is here. Isn’t that right?” Stiles snarled. He yanked at the chains again, the tree creaking in response.

“Scott...” Peter started to say.

Stiles knew from the look on his face that he’d managed to saw the chain through the tree far enough. He planted a foot against the trunk for leverage and lunged forward. The chain caught hard against his wrists and against the worn-down flesh of the tree. It creaked. Cracked. Groaned.

The top of the tree fell away from him, freeing up the chains as Stiles rushed forward in a fury of teeth and claws and mindless rage. There were too many sensations rushing through his head: the beautiful freedom of _movement_ and _energy_ . The hum of the forest. The shouts of his friends. The smell of the earth, of sweat, of fear and anger and, oh, _blood_. Stiles knew he got his teeth into someone, but he was too far gone to know who.

The last clear image he remembered was Derek, swinging a fist directly at his face. Then darkness.

* * *

He woke up to see Peter Hale in a silk bathrobe, holding a cup of coffee. He had fuzzy white slippers on his feet. Stiles’s body felt stiff as he sat up and looked around himself. When they re-built the pack house, they had put in a couple of small rooms (cells) with reinforced steel doors, in the basement in case anyone got so out of control they had to be locked up.

Anyone like Stiles.

“Well you certainly put your foot in it,” Peter commented.

Stiles groaned as he stood up. The enhanced healing would kick in soon, but sleeping on a concrete floor wasn’t fun for anyone. “How bad was it?” he asked.

Peter looked like he was about to make a joke, then shut his mouth and took a slow sip of his coffee. There was a short half-flight of stairs down to the recessed cell, and he made no move to descend them.

“That bad?” Stiles cringed.

“They know it was the full moon,” Peter offered. Then he tipped his head to the side. “Though, frankly, I think everyone would have preferred if you’d tried to kill them to some of what you said last night. Speaking from experience, they do forgive attempted homicide eventually.”

Fuck.

“What about you?” Stiles asked glumly. “What did I say to you?”

Peter shrugged a shoulder. “Nothing you haven’t said to my face.” He stepped back from the doorway, slippers shuffling quietly against the ground as he headed for the stairs. “Anyway,” he called, “there’s breakfast upstairs if you can stand to face any of them!”

Stiles went home for breakfast.

* * *

It wasn’t like he could blame it all on the full moon either. A week later found him in the vet clinic, only his instinct to defer to his alpha keeping him from ripping Scott to shreds.

“You said you were going to find something else!” Stiles snapped. “What, you’re just giving up now?”

Scott scrubbed a hand over his face. “I’m not _giving up_ , Stiles! I’m just saying it’s going to take a while. We don’t exactly have a fully operational lab at our disposal here.” He gestured around the office. “We can send some samples out to our regular labs, but stimulants are controlled substances, and there’s a point at which it’s way too suspicious. It’ll take time.”

“I don’t have time, Scott!”

Work was a nightmare. Stiles didn’t _think_ anyone had noticed yet, that he hadn’t been getting anything done, but eventually someone was _going to notice._

Sighing, Scott sat in one of the chairs in front of his desk, elbows on his knees. “Have you tried any of the techniques we talked about? Satomi’s meditation? Have you even _tried_ to find an anchor? After last week –”

Stiles snarled in frustration. He could feel his claws slipping. His eyes were almost certainly flashing. “I don’t need to meditate. I don’t need an anchor. I need _medication_.”

“I _know_ ,” Scott assured him, all big, pleading eyes. God, Stiles wanted to strangle him. “But until we figure that out, Stiles, you need to actually try to do some stuff to take the edge off. If you can figure out your anchor and get the shift under control, the sensory stuff might not be so overwhelming.”

“God, you don’t _get it_ , do you?” Stiles said. “I can’t just shut it off like you can! My brain doesn’t work like that, Scott. An anchor isn’t going to let me sit at my desk and work without hearing every fucking conversation going on in the whole building.”

“You’ll get it under control.”

“I’m gonna get fired!” Stiles yelled.

Scott’s head dropped. He rubbed at his eyes tiredly. “It won’t come to that. And if it does –”

Stiles stormed out of the clinic.

* * *

  
  
  


By the next full moon, they still hadn’t figured it out

The pack house had half-decent soundproofing, but Stiles could still hear the murmur of conversation from upstairs. Then the creak of the basement stairs.

Peter appeared at the top of the stairs in the doorway of Stiles’s cell. “Scott said you asked for me,” he said.

Stiles was pacing the back of the cell, trying to get as much movement out of his system as he could before the moon started to rise. Before he had to be chained to the wall.

“I’d say I’m flattered, but considering your last full moon, I’m actually wondering if I’ve done something to offend you,” Peter went on. “More so than usual, I mean.”

Stiles paused just long enough to glare at him. “I told them to just shut the fucking door, but Scott says I shouldn’t be alone tonight, and of course _Saint Scotty_ knows best, so.” Honestly, he didn’t relish the thought of being locked in this room, alone all night, but the idea of going off at his pack again sounded even worse. “If you don’t want to do it, do me a favor and sneak out the back so they don’t know you aren’t down here.”

“Now you’re asking me to do you favors,” Peter mused, leaning against the doorframe.

“I didn’t ask you down here so you could be fucking annoying,” Stiles snapped. He paused, starting to feel the itch of the moon’s pull. It started in his gums, the fangs threatening to make an appearance. Stiles shrugged off his flannel, then his t-shirt. He had ruined his shirt on his first full moon. No sense in wrecking another. He went for the manacles hanging from the wall.

They hadn’t used these ones yet. There were four cuffs hanging from the wall, two for the ankles and two for the wrists. With the way the chains were attached together, if you stood close to the wall, you could spread your arms and legs fairly comfortably. If you moved farther from the wall, though, the cuffs were slowly pinched together. It had been Stiles’s idea, actually – to prevent anyone held down here from breaking the chains through forward momentum. Now that he was the one getting chained up, the idea seemed a bit more barbaric. Dehumanizing.

Peter watched as Stiles clipped himself into the leg cuffs with the key, then the right wrist. He made no move to come farther into the room.

“And if you could at least give me a hand before you go?” Stiles prompted, irritated that he was being made to _ask_ someone to chain him up like a dog.

Finally, Peter deigned to step down into the room, tugging the door closed behind him. The middle of it had a window with vertical bars over it, which cast a bright square of light into the otherwise dimly lit cell. He picked up the remaining cuff and clipped it around Stiles’s wrist with a careless efficiency. “I’m staying,” he explained. “Can’t have you breaking out and eviscerating the locals, after all.”

“I’m sure you’re very worried about public welfare,” Stiles replied, rolling his eyes. He didn’t know what Peter was up to, staying like this, but he doubted it was anything good.

Huffing, Peter said, “Oh, but can you imagine the drama and outrage in the pack? The angst of knowing that their beloved Stiles has gone and eaten someone? No, thank you. I’ll skip all of that if it’s alright with you.” He locked the final cuff and slipped the key into his pocket.

Stiles could tell he was trying to play it off, maybe to put him at ease. He hated it. “Yeah, the pack would much rather I kill you,” he spat. He stepped in closer, wanting to see how worried Peter actually was about the prospect. “I’d be doing them a favor.”

Peter rolled his eyes. “Really, Stiles. If you’re trying to hurt my feelings, you should go for something a _little_ more sensitive than pack relations.” He slipped a hand up to pat Stiles’s cheek, which he swatted away with a snarl. “Like killing Laura. That’s always a good one.”

He felt his fangs starting to descend, and Stiles bared them, taking a half step closer into Peter’s space, which left them sharing air.

Instead of retreating, Peter placed a hand on his chest and took a step forward himself, backing Stiles toward the wall. “Or you could talk about how I was burned alive twice,” he continued, taking another step forward and then another, until Stiles’s back hit stone. “Always fun to go after trauma. That’s what you do with Isaac, isn’t it? It works so well for him.” Peter smiled, but it was a cruel expression, challenging. His eyes flashed blue.

“No,” Stiles muttered, hating the way Peter was caging him in but knowing he had the advantage now that the chains were on. The pull of the moon was starting to boil in his veins. “You’re so fucked up and dead inside, nothing really gets to you anymore, does it?”

“Lucky for you,” Peter agreed. He stroked Stiles’s cheek again, and this time Stiles just turned his face away. “But that’s why I’m down here instead of one of the others, isn’t it? I’m the only one you can’t hurt.”

Stiles snarled, eyes flashing. The noises from around him were starting to fade, blissfully, into the background. His mind honed in on Peter through reddened vision. Looking at him like prey. Like an adversary. “You’re the only one I don’t care if I hurt.”

Peter clicked his tongue, looking fondly exasperated. “Sweetheart.”

His claws slashed forward suddenly, the chains not restricting the movement of his arms this close to the wall. They tore across Peter’s upper arms, catching in and slicing the sleeves of his v-neck.

The heel of Peter’s hand drove up at Stiles’s nose with a sickening crunch of bone that had him distracted by the taste of blood, sputtering. It gave Peter enough time to put some distance between them. The cuts on his arms were already healing, leaving nothing but torn and blood-stained sleeves.

Peter gave him space after that. He sat on the stairs just inside the door of the cell and watched as Stiles yanked at his chains, thrashing and letting them cut into his wrists and ankles, as he clawed at his own skin. His senses had expanded out again, taking in every stink of mildew in the basement. Every ambient hum of the pack house. The burn of the moon under his skin.

He couldn’t pace very far. About five paces to the right or left before his arms were pulled backward and down toward the leg manacles. And god, he needed to _move_. Stiles felt like a live wire, like he would burn up if he didn’t work the energy out.

Time went by strangely during a shift. A type of dissociation, he had once explained to one of the betas relaxing comfortably upstairs. It seemed to go forever. It seemed to slip by all at once. Stiles was vaguely aware of Peter pulling out his cellphone, scrolling through as he stared at the screen. Some long time later, he looked up to watch as Stiles yanked at the hooks on the wall.

“You really aren’t even trying, are you?” Peter laughed from where he was sitting. “The little human boy that knew nothing about werewolves, who still managed to teach our alpha to control the shift – look at you now.”

Stiles rushed at him and got about four feet from the wall before his arms were pinched back too far. He growled and backed up. “You offered to turn me back then,” Stiles reminded him. “Did you know it would be like this?”

Peter snorted and began to pace the cell on the opposite side of the room. “You would have been better back then. Easier to work with. Back then you had some ambition, some sense of authority left in you.”

“Fuck you,” Stiles spat.

“If the boy I offered the bite to could see what a whining, pathetic shit you’ve become –”

Stiles lunged again without thinking. Too fast. His legs and arms were yanked together behind him as he leapt forward, feet pulled out from under him. He landed hard on one knee, the impact shooting pain up his thigh, enough that he roared in response. Stiles couldn’t even push himself up off of it, his arms trapped behind his back. So he just slumped to the side, hissing and snarling at the feel of his body healing, eyes squeezed shut.

He heard Peter’s footsteps drawing closer but didn’t open his eyes until they stopped. Peter stood over him, one bare foot inches from Stiles’s face. He cocked his head to the side as he stared down at Stiles. “Is this your plan? You’ll break yourself against your chains every full moon, torture and bleed yourself?”

“You think I want to be like this?” Stiles wheezed at him.

“I think you want Scott to see you like this,” Peter replied. “I think this is your way of punishing him for biting you.”

The suggestion caught Stiles off-guard. “Scott saved my life.” He must have shattered his kneecap, because he could feel the bone healing.

“He did,” Peter agreed. “And you know that.” He crouched down beside Stiles and tapped a finger against his temple. “You know it here. But part of you is angry at him anyway.”

“What, is this the part where you give me your armchair psychology bullshit?” Stiles snapped. He tried to shift up, but the only way he could get his range of motion back would be to basically wriggle his way backward across the floor until the chains were loose enough.

Peter studied his face and sighed. “You hate being like this,” he explained, “and he’s the one that made you like this. When he decided to save you, he decided to change you. And you’re pissed off about it.”

“I didn’t want to die,” Stiles argued.

“Of course not,” Peter agreed. “And if you’d had the choice, I’m sure you would have chosen the bite over dying. But you didn’t get to choose. He had to choose for you.”

Maybe it was the way he was tied up. Maybe it was that the moon’s power was starting to wane. Maybe Peter just had a really good point. In any case, his words sent a cold, helpless feeling through Stiles that he wasn’t ready for. It had been there for a while, he thought, lost somewhere in the violent buzz of his overstimulated senses and untamable energy. It felt too big to manage. Too big to even look at.

“Why are you doing this?” Stiles asked, and his voice came out thicker than he’d expected. Shaky. “Why are you trying to help?”

“Well, despite our spats over the years, Stiles, I do like you,” Peter told him with a huffed breath and a soft smile. As soon as it graced his lips, though, it went a little sad. He sat down on the ground, knee next to Stiles’s head. “And I know you. I know you’re stubborn enough to not deal with this, to just keep throwing yourself against these walls and hurting your friends until either the chains break or they do.”

The suggestion sent a stab of fear through him, a variation on the same guilt he’d been feeling ever since he’d first started fighting with them after getting turned.

“Your friends love you,” Peter told him, “but you’re too smart for your own good, and there’s only so much abuse a person can take.”

“You think they’d throw me out of the pack?” Stiles croaked, the very suggestion setting a lump in his throat.

Peter snorted. “God, no. They’d let you stick around until none of you were sure who hated you more: them or you. You would leave way before that, though.”

And however bad Stiles had thought things were, they must have been so much worse, because he found himself pressing his forehead against Peter Hale’s knee, accepting and even asking for his help. “I don’t know how to fix this,” he admitted.

Reaching behind himself, Peter retrieved Stiles’s flannel and slid it under his shoulder and the cold stone floor. Then he shifted closer and tucked his knee beneath Stiles’s head. “You do, though,” Peter told him. Fingers brushed through Stiles’s hair. “You helped to potty-train half of those mutts upstairs. Don’t go playing dumb on me now.”

“It’s the meds,” Stiles insisted. “I don’t know what to fucking do about the meds.”

“And what have you tried so far?” Peter asked.

Stiles felt a weight of exhaustion settling over himself. He’d felt it the morning after his first shift, but had attributed it to getting knocked out. Maybe it was a post-shift thing, though. He focused on the feeling of Peter’s hand in his hair, trying to drown out all of the other noise of his senses. The truth was, he hadn’t really tried anything yet. He’d tried feeling sorry for himself. Tried not trying. Maybe, in some ways, figuring out how to live as a werewolf made this all seem too real, too permanent.

Because this was forever. There was no un-doing this. And that was the most terrifying part of this: Stiles needed to learn how to live as a werewolf _forever_.

“I think you can unlock me now,” Stiles said, voice soft.

Peter’s fingers caught around the tip of his ear, tugging gently. “I don’t know. This is actually a pretty good look on you,” he commented.

Stiles peeked up at the playful, lecherous look on Peter’s face. “You aren’t going to feel even a little bit bad for hitting on me while I’m in, like, a vulnerable state. Are you?”

“Not even a little,” Peter assured him. “If it makes you feel better, I was going to wait until I’d untied you before I copped a feel.”

“Creep,” Stiles said, but he was smiling as he said it.

Peter unlocked the manacles and helped Stiles rub the dried blood away from his wrists and ankles. It felt oddly intimate. It felt like a pack thing in some ways. Wolves taking care of their own. It felt like a little more than that, too.

In the time that they had known one another, Stiles had never thought of Peter Hale as a ‘safe’ person. But maybe it made sense, now that Stiles himself felt like his greatest threat, that one of the most dangerous people he knew felt safer than his closest friends.

“They’ll be making breakfast upstairs soon,” Peter told him as Stiles pulled his shirt on.

The dread set in right away. Stiles knew he needed to try harder, needed to work on processing what he was going through instead of trying to push his friends away. But he was _tired_ , and he’d just almost cried on Peter fucking Hale. He didn’t have the energy to deal just yet.

“But I was thinking,” Peter went on. “You know, there’s this perfectly charming little diner up on seventh street. Best french toast you’ve ever had. I might sneak out the back door and do that instead.” He picked Stiles’s flannel off the floor and held it out to him. “What do you say?”

Stiles stared at the flannel. 

His whole life was changing now, whether he wanted it to or not, and Stiles had a lot of big decisions ahead of himself. How he wanted to deal, who he wanted to be, what he wanted to do with the power and responsibility that had been handed to him. Who he wanted to have by his side when he did it.

Stiles looked Peter in the eye as he took the flannel. “I say, if you’re asking me on a date, that means you have to pay.”

Peter grinned at him. “Fair enough.”

As Stiles stepped out of the cell, he just about jumped out of his skin when Peter grabbed a handful of his ass. “Hey!” he yelped, clutching a hand over his butt.

“I waited until you were untied,” Peter reminded him.

Stiles barked a laugh and swatted Peter with his flannel. “Creep! You have to buy me dinner – well, breakfast – _first_.”

“We never agreed on anything of the sort. You’re changing the rules,” Peter insisted. He fell in step beside Stiles as they stepped out of the dim basement. Through the front window, they could see the first hints of sunrise breaking the horizon.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments make me so happy!
> 
> You can find me [here on tumblr](https://luulapants.tumblr.com/).
> 
> You can also find mock-speed's other words on [tumblr](https://mock-arts.tumblr.com/) and [AO3](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mockspeed/pseuds/mockspeed).


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